Pittsburgh and Deindustrialization

A typical Pittsburgh neighbourhood

Every once in awhile a newspaper article is published that extols the charms of Pittsburgh as a tourist destination. I enjoy reading such articles because Pittsburgh is wonderful city for which I feel great affection. However, lately, there is a sameness to the articles and their manufactured, somewhat contrived message that now seems a little suspect.

Usually these articles go something like this:

You might think that Pittsburgh is a real stinking dump but this no longer true! It is actually a very liveable city with some colourful restaurants, great museums and lots of people who don’t seem to mind living there at all! When the Steel mills were operating Pittsburgh was known as ‘the Smoky City.’ Air quality was terrible and they had to turn on the street lights at noon. Then all the mills shut down in the 70’s and now the air is much better. There are lots of new industries such as health care, research and robotics. Pittsburgh really is quite a cool city–even Andy Warhol came from there!

All of the above is true. The Pittsburgh revival is real and it is a city filled with interesting, friendly people. Its universities can be excellent (e.g. Carnegie Mellon). The museums are well worth a visit, for example, the Warhol, the Carnegie and the Children’s Museum. Some of its neighbourhoods are very attractive and vibrant. As in Buffalo, it is surprising just how beautiful some of its architecture is.

The conventional interpretation

What these articles tend to suggest is the following: that dirty industries and the jobs they provide are bad, while clean, white-collar research jobs are much better–for all concerned; that the steel industry left town all at once in the 70’s. This was bit hard at first but it appears that it’s been a good thing in the long run; that the dirt that the steel industry produced was an inevitable outcome of steel production and that the only way to clean up the environment was to get rid of that type of industry entirely; and finally, that whatever was lost during the period of de-industrialization during the 70’s and 80’s has been replaced with something of equal or greater value.

Some things to consider

What these articles tend not to mention is that one of the reasons that housing is so cheap and artists’ studios in cool industrial spaces are so available in Pittsburgh is that hundreds of thousands of people left town, never to return.  De-population of the once vibrant industrial city of Pittsburgh was an extraordinarily painful process for many, especially for those unlikely to find work in any type of new, research-based economy. This dislocation of one group of people with another, where the overlap between the two groups is minimal, was a socially corrosive experience for those made redundant.

Many neighbourhoods in Pittsburgh have yet to recover from de-industrialization. These may be far from the relatively urbane ones such the Golden Triangle (downtown), Lawrenceville, or Bloomfield, where some new investment has trickled in. The pain in less-glamorous neighbourhoods, such as Munhall, Wilmerding, or McKeesport, still appears raw and unresolved.

Pittsburgh still tends to be a highly segregated city according to race. The Hill District, for example, is essentially a black ghetto within walking distance of downtown. It attracts little investment, is not a place you want to explore late at night and is under no danger of being gentrified anytime soon. The racism which presumably perpetuates such ghettos is as powerful a force as recent attempts at civic reinvention.

The speed at which de-industrialization occurred to the steel industry in Pittsburgh always seemed a bit fishy. Why did it happen so quickly? Can it be explained by market forces (e.g. cost of labour, materials or transportation) or are there other, possibly more sinister factors such as avoidance of environmental regulation, or the desire to set up shop in locales without pesky, activist unions? If Hamilton, Ontario can still be making steel, why is it that thirty years ago Pittsburgh decided that it couldn’t do the same?